Skewness in gold and silver

Blogger John Koning recently posted on the negative skewness (or as he says: bulls walk up the stairs, bears jump out the window) of the stock market. He notes that “there are plenty of famous meltdowns in stocks, including 1914, 1929, 1987, and 2008, but almost no famous melt ups”. To demonstrate this, he produces a chart of 22,013 trading days since 1928 grouped by the daily return and showing the percentage of days that were negative.

 

The chart below replicates Koning’s figures but I have also included gold and silver London Fixes since 1968 for comparison, which is the longest data set I have. [read more]